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Tuesday, 28 October 2014

The complementarity can also be seen in the different kinds of deixis (relation to the here & now) associated with processes on the one hand and participants on the other. A process is made finite — it is pinned down in time, with point of reference in the act of speaking. A participant is made determinate, being held in a location within a referential space. The same distinction also appears in the temporal unfolding of a text, where participants have the potential to persist as discourse referents, but processes are excluded, unless they are turned into honorary participants through the use of grammatical metaphor.